Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

Mercer leaned in toward Jansen. “Janse, we need to get some pictures of that thing. I’ve got a buddy at Port Viking U. who’d love to see them.”

“Hold on a second. I left my camera in the other operating room.” Jansen said. She ducked out of the room and headed down the hall.

Coyote Westlake awoke with a start. There had been a noise at her back. For a half moment she wondered where she was. This didn’t look like her hab shed. Then it all came back to her. She was in the field hospital, napping on the operating table. But what was that noise at her back? She rolled over to look.

And froze.

That rock wasn’t a rock anymore. It was alive.

It had extruded two stalked eyes, a mouth, and a pair of crawling limbs. Its surface still looked like plain old rock, but even as she watched, bits of it started to peel and fall off, revealing gleaming skin.

And it was looking at her through eyes that took her clear back to her worst nightmare. The eye in the stone.

Her heart pounding, Coyote sat up on the table and carefully stepped off it backwards, keeping the operating table between herself and the rock monster.

She had to kill this thing. It moved forward, toward her, making a strange snuffling noise. It encountered the edge of the table, and its stalked eyes looked downward to investigate the situation.

Coyote used that moment to back away further, toward the wall. She looked around the room frantically searching for a weapon. Mercer’s geology kit. Her cutting laser. She could see it sticking out of the bag.

Keeping her back to the wall, Coyote shuffled around the room toward the laser. The rock monster had backed away from the table’s edge and was watching her again. Three more steps. Two. One. Coyote grabbed for the laser, and the sudden move startled the rock monster. It let out an aggressive-sounding growl and seemed to raise itself off the table a bit.

Coyote glanced down at the laser and fumbled with the control settings. Tight beam, maximum power. She looked back up and saw the thing open its mouth, revealing razor-sharp blade teeth.

There was a movement at the door. Acting on reflex, Coyote looked toward it and aimed the laser.

Jansen Alter came into the room and froze. The rock monster swiveled its eyes toward her. “Oh my God,” she said at last. “What is—”

“It’s no rock, that’s for damn sure.” Coyote hissed. She reaimed the laser, right between the thing’s eyes, and pressed the power button. A ruby beam sliced into the thing’s head, and it let out a death scream. Its skin bubbled and burst, it fell from the table, and dark brown slime splattered on the floor as it hit.

Coyote Westlake felt a rush of exultation. She had killed it. She had won, this time. But the shakes started coming back. It would take more than killing a rock monster for her to come all the way back.

But there was a gleam in her eye as she stepped over the slime and handed Jansen the laser. “Make sure it stays dead this time,” she said.

The cold stars of the Moon’s north polar sky glared down on the busy team below. A tense group of engineers stood inside the transparent pressure dome, watching the strain gauges on the flare drill. Larry, still holding the gee-wave detector that had led them to the spot, stood back a bit from the others, wishing they could all get out of their pressure suits. But there was no pressure in the dome yet, and if there was some later, it wouldn’t be anything you’d want to breathe. Everyone at the Pole had been briefed about the Wheel—but it would take something like a jet of gas from the Moon to convince most of them. The majority of the techs were skeptical, to put it mildly.

Larry was tired, but that was understandable. They had roused him in the middle of the night, as soon as the news from Mars had come in. At least Lucian was being allowed to sleep. Lucian, exhausted by his rush trip to Central City and back, was going to need his rest.

Larry looked around at all the activity inside the dome. Four hours ago, this had been a barren piece of undistinguished Lunar landscape. But then the message from Mars came down, describing the alternate-form gravity-wave detector and how to build it. It hadn’t taken long to confirm that it received a form of gravity-wave signal beam.

The alternate-form detector was a device easy to build and easy to use—and it led them right to this spot the moment they switched it on.

“Strain drop to zero!” the flare controller called. “We’re breaking through—”

A cheer went up, but was drowned out almost immediately by a plume of dust and vile greenish gas jetting up from the drillhole. But the Martians had warned of that too, prompting the placement of the dome.

“Pressure in there for sure,” the drill-gang boss said, walking over to Larry. “God only knows what this muck is,” he said, fanning a hand through the fog. “Looks like the same stuff they had on Mars. You know what the hell is it?”

“Most likely biological waste products.”

“From the Wheel ! You mean to say we’re walking around in gaseous Wheel shit ?”

Larry turned his palms upward, the pressure-suit version of a shrug. “Could be. Probably. Your guess is as good as mine. But we’re through? Broken through into the top of the Rabbit Hole?”

“Still spooling up the drill head. Then we drop a camera and see what we’ve got. But yeah, we’re through. You guys get to find out what it is we’ve broken into. If I were you, I’d go wake up your pal and start getting into the teleoperator rig.”

Larry watched as Lucian struggled into his armored pressure suit. “You clear on this alternate-form gravity-wave stuff?” he asked. “It could make the difference between—”

Lucian nodded testily. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I know what difference it could make.” He turned and glared at the suit technician. “And you, take it easy with that clamp,” he snapped. “You’re supposed to hook up the suit, not amputate my arm.”

Larry checked his watch. He would have to leave soon if he was going to have time to get into the T.O. rig. “Look, there’s one other thing you need to be clear on. The rock monster sprouted eyes, a mouth, and legs in a matter of minutes. It had a circulatory system and a nervous system, and what resembled electronic power and logic circuits where its brain should have been. Obviously, the ability to generate all that was in the rock all the time. They’re calling it an existing implicate order , whatever the hell that means. The point is, the rock monster was hidden away in the rock all along. The signal from Mars says that before it woke up, the rock monster was indistinguishable from asteroidal rock. This Dr. Mercer Chavez thinks that some of the asteroids we’ve mined for organic material were in fact Lander creatures in an inert, encysted phase. And don’t ask how you can get such camouflage at the molecular level. No one knows.”

Lucian frowned. “In other words, anything that looks like a rock down there could suddenly come to life and bite me in the ass,” he said. “How could that be?”

“Try a better question. Like why? These things are the size of mountains. They can land on a planet and just take over. But they disguise themselves as rocks and hide, maybe for millions of years at a time. So what are they hiding from ? What’s dangerous enough to scare them ?”

That drew Lucian up short, and the suit technician too.

“Jesus,” Lucian said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But why ? Why land asteroids and build pyramids on Mars?”

“And Venus and Mercury and the big moons of the outer planets as well,” Larry said. “Word from all over: radar scans of Venus, Sunside flyovers of Mercury, and eyewitness accounts from Ganymede and Titan. These things are going up everywhere.”